The Anthrax Letters: The Attacks That Shocked America (38 page)

On November 21, 2002, the Perry Videx Company in Hainesport, New Jersey, hosted an unusual group of visitors. The company sells equipment that is used by pharmaceutical, chemical, and food manufacturers to process their ingredients. But the 20 visitors were not interested in the traditional applications. Rather they wanted to know if the equipment could be applied to more nefarious purposes, such as the development of chemical or biological weapons. The group was learning what to look for in preparation for going to Iraq. They were United Nations weapons inspectors, members of UNMOVIC, the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission.

U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441 had just been enacted on November 7. Like other resolutions since the 1991 Persian Gulf War, it noted Iraq’s failure to provide “full, final, and complete disclosure” about its weapons of mass destruction. Now, under military threat from the United States, the Iraqi regime was being offered “a final opportunity to comply with its disarmament obligations,” according to the resolution. It would be the inspectors’ task to report on Iraqi compliance.

Gregg Epstein, president of Perry Videx, walked the group through a cavernous warehouse filled with bulky equipment. He paused at the mouth of a huge steel cylinder positioned horizontally. Its thick door was swung open, as if beckoning entry into a bank vault. Epstein explained that the piece is a centrifuge that separates large quantities of liquids from solids. “This one was actually used to make vitamin C,” he said, “but bad stuff like sarin or VX nerve agents would corrode the metal.” He pointed at the metal inner wall and said that if it had been lined with a corrosion-resistant material, like Teflon, the inspectors should be suspicious.

He moved to a 6-foot tall metallic cylinder about 3 feet in diameter, capped with a removable dome. A half dozen pipes sprouted from the side and base. “This is a spray dryer,” he said. Manufactured by the Niro Company, it is used in pharmaceutical and food processing to make free-flowing particles that can be microscopic in size. A slurry of material and a fine powder are fed in through the top. From the side a pipe conveys hot air into the cylinder while another one draws cooler air away. Although spray dryers are used in the manufacture of a variety of innocuous products like toothpaste and flavored foods, they can also be used to produce biological warfare agents.

It is just such a piece of equipment that Richard Spertzel has in mind when he thinks about the possible source of the anthrax letters. Contrary to the FBI and many other observers, Spertzel finds the “lone wolf” theory unlikely. In December 2001 he told the House Committee on International Relations that descriptions of the anthrax in the Daschle letter indicated “it could be produced only by some group that was involved with a current or former state program in recent years.”

Spertzel’s favored candidate for the source was Iraq, where he had previously served as a weapons inspector for the United Nations Special Commission. The Daschle letter contained anthrax that was more pure and concentrated than any that had been found in the Soviet, U.S., or Iraqi biological programs. But, Spertzel noted in his testimony, “Iraq, unlike the Soviet and U.S. programs, did not mill its dried product; rather the Iraqi BW [biological weapons] team learned the method of obtaining readily aerosolizable smallparticle product in a one-step spray-drying process.”

A year later, in September 2002, Spertzel testified before the House Armed Services Committee:

Few can match the experience Spertzel brings to the discussion. After graduating in 1960 from the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine, he began a 28-year Army career. While in the service, he received a Ph.D. in microbiology from Notre Dame. But most of his career was spent at Fort Detrick where, until the end of the U.S. offensive biological arms program in 1969, he helped develop germ weapons, including anthrax.

Spertzel cited his expertise to underscore how unlikely the lone wolf theory is. “In my opinion,” he told the
Washington Post
in October 2002, “there are maybe four or five people in the whole country who might be able to make this stuff, and I’m one of them.” He was referring to the unusually pure mix of the anthrax in the Daschle and Leahy letters. “And even with a good lab and staff to help run it, it might take me a year to come up with a product as good.” (Others believe that developing the product would be easier than Spertzel suggests. Matthew Meselson and Ken Alibek say that the micrographs they saw of spores in the Daschle letter showed no added materials. Each of them told me he thought the spores could have been prepared by any skillful microbiologist.)

In 1994, Spertzel began a 4-year tour with UNSCOM, the predecessor of UNMOVIC. Serving as the commission’s head biological weapons inspector, he oversaw UNSCOM’s finding in 1995 that Iraq’s germ weapons program had been far more advanced than the regime previously acknowledged. Moreover, the commission determined that Iraq was still hiding information. Spertzel himself had found “a major disparity between the amount of agent declared as produced by Iraq and that estimated by UNCSOM experts,” he later told Congress.

Paradoxically, despite the evidence, several members of the U.N. Security Council had begun to criticize UNSCOM for being too aggressive. By 1998, Russia, France, and China even seemed to be challenging the integrity of the inspectors. Spertzel had decided the commission had become a political football and could no longer function usefully. He left in July. In December, President Clinton ordered the bombing of Iraqi installations with the proclaimed aim of degrading Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Subsequently, Saddam Hussein prohibited the return of UN inspectors. The next year UNSCOM was disbanded and replaced in December 1999 with a newly staffed UNMOVIC.

Richard Spertzel’s voice is soft. His nasal twang hints at his western Pennsylvania origins, where he grew up on a farm. In a dark checked sports jacket, he squinted through metal-framed glasses as he emphasized a point. Despite his quiet demeanor, not long into a conversation it becomes clear that he is a man of forceful convictions.

When I asked Spertzel to comment on the anthrax mailer scenario I posed at the beginning of this chapter, his observations were similar to Barbara Rosenberg’s. Despite their differences about the source of the anthrax letters, they both found the depiction largely plausible, at least for the letters to NBC and the
New York Post
. Like Rosenberg, Spertzel allowed that the anthrax in those letters could have been placed in the envelopes as I described, though not the material later sent to the two senators. Spertzel:

Exactly how that finely graded anthrax was transferred to the envelopes remains puzzling. Perhaps a sucking mechanism of some sort was used to draw the powder into the envelopes.

I asked Spertzel to talk further about weaponizing anthrax while not, of course, giving an actual recipe (not that he would in any case). Spertzel began: “You know, the pharmaceutical industry uses a number of silica compounds in the manufacturing of inhalant medications.” Silica, or silicon dioxide, is a hard glassy mineral that forms a variety of familiar substances, including sand and quartz. In microscopic size it can adhere to the surface of other particles and keep them from sticking to each other. It is the silica-coated particles that enhance the slippery characteristics of products like paint and toothpaste. Spertzel noted that since the 1950s silica compounds could also be added to biological agents “which makes them ‘flowable’ and readily dispersible in the air.” (The coating reduces the electrostatic attraction that the agents might otherwise exhibit.) He mentioned Aerosil, the commercial name for one such compound. It is a fine white powder whose particles are about 12 nanometers, a thousandth the size of an anthrax spore. He explained further:

That does not sound very complicated, I said. “Well, it’s not super complicated, but it’s a very exacting operation to get to the desired particle size. You need a lot of trial and error,” Spertzel said.

Routine spray drying might produce a batch of particles, some of them 20 microns in size or larger, some perhaps smaller. The larger particles are not individual spores but a collection of several spores that have stuck to each other during the processing. They emerge from the spray dryer as a single particle whose surface is coated with silica. So how could someone produce a “pure” mix of individual free-floating spores?

Spertzel cannot fathom any other way that the process could have yielded silica-coated particles of 1 to 3 microns, scarcely larger than the naked spore. The process, he reiterated, would require repeated adjustments to the heated air flow. And after each trial run, an examination of particle size would be needed, perhaps under a scanning electron microscope. “Trial and error, trial and error,” he repeated.

A small room would be inadequate to process the anthrax, Spertzel insisted, as he tallied up the necessary equipment: refrigerator, incubator, spray dryer, maybe a 3-foot-wide scanning electron microscope. And all the work would have to be done in a thoroughly contained area. “I would say the space you need would be something like 20 × 50 feet. This is why I say it’s got to be something that was done with the complicity of the country in which it was made,” he concluded.

Assuming the complexity, time, and space that Spertzel specified, production of the finely graded anthrax would seem unlikely to have taken place in a known U.S. laboratory. There would be too many people around for the effort to go unnoticed. On the other hand, constructing a “safe” room in some obscure location seems less improbable. Thus, to flatly rule out the possibility of a domestic loner, as Spertzel does, seems an overreach. Still, one can hardly deem his conjectures unreasonable.

He noted that documents uncovered by UNSCOM showed that Iraqi agencies had sought to obtain the Ames strain in 1988 and 1989. There were no restrictions at that time to obtaining pathogens from laboratories around the world. He thinks a likely source could have been the Pasteur Institute in Paris, which had several strains. “We know the Iraqis obtained many strains of anthrax from the Pasteur Institute,” he said, “but we only know what two of them were.” (In March 2003, I inquired of Michèle Mock, director of the institute’s Annual Report on Toxins and Bacterial Pathogenesis, if the Ames strain had ever been stocked there. Her e-mail reply: “No, we never had the Ames strain at Pasteur.”)

How would all this relate to September 11 and Osama bin Laden?

Spertzel said there is evidence that demonstrates a connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda. He mentioned that three Iraqis who defected at different times “all told the same story” about Iraqi cooperation with Al Qaeda, and “I have personally spoken to two of them.” Convinced of their credibility, it is no great leap for Spertzel to believe that there was collusion between Iraqi operatives and the people responsible for September 11. Around the time of our conversation, in early 2003, members of the Bush administration also were emphasizing that there was a linkage. In February, Secretary of State Colin Powell provided the U.N. Security Council with evidence that Al Qaeda operatives had been working with the Iraqis. Whether this meant collusion concerning the anthrax letters remains uncertain.

When I reminded Spertzel that many people disagree with his views about the source of the anthrax letters, he replied, “I know they do. And that’s the reason I’m willing to sit back and wait for a couple of years and say, ‘Look you bastards, I told you so.’” With a wink and a laugh he added, “If I live long enough.”